BODILY EXPERIENCE AS A KEY TO NEW DIGITAL ENCOUNTERS

The transition from craft to mechanic production over the first half of the twentieth century led to an aesthetic crisis, in Herbert Marcuse’s words, the division of ‘thought and action’, ‘conception and execution’, ‘hand and mind’, in several disciplines, including the field of architecture. Architectural discourse, theory and practice today have to additionally deal with a new crisis arising from the encounter with digital media. The role of computers in the more creative aspects of architectural design is still however, limited and the promise of digital tools heralding a new era in our ways of designing is far from being realized. There has been huge gap between what is theoretically possible with computation and current practice; between the potential of digital media and actual usage by architects. On one hand architecture has seen the widespread adoption of computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM) as representation tools in the last 2 decades. On the other hand, conventional methodologies such as sketching and model making are still crucial in architecture education. Related to this crisis, Sema Alaçam argues that aesthetic dimensions of bodily experience is one of the key concepts in the effort to get a deeper understanding of today’s crisis and gain insight about future directions of digital design environments. In her talk she will discuss the potentials of imperfective encounters between architecture students and the unexplored digital.

29 April Wednesday, 11:00
İzmir University of Economics, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design

Dr. Sema Alaçam is an architect and a lecturer at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture. She received her Bachelor of Architecture degree from ITU in 2005 and Master of Architecture degree from Architectural Design Computing graduate program of ITU in 2008

She attended Hyperbody Research Group Studies in TU Delft, Netherlands during 2006. Receved her PhD in 2014, she was among the first generation PhD students at the Architectural Design Computing Graduate Program in Graduate School of Science Engineering and Technology, Department of Informatics of ITU where she also worked as a research and teaching assistant between 2007 and 2014. She worked at ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture, Chair of Structural Design in 2013-2014 during her PhD studies as an academic guest. Both her master and PhD research studies have been supported by BAP-ITU(Scientific and Projects-ITU) and TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) under the number of 2210, 2211 and 2214-A.

Apart from the undergraduate architectural design studio, she teaches various graduate courses related to the computational design and fabrication approaches in architecture. She has numerous papers presented and printed in national and international conferences.